by Nils Peterson
Galway Kinnell said all good writing has a certain quality in common, “a tenderness toward existence.” I agree and feel that one of the great maladies of our age is the communal loss of this feeling. Wendell Berry says “people exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love, and to defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.”
Here’s the first part of a poem of mine:
Rain steady on the roof. Far shore lost. Sea quiet,
gray, introspective – like me, I think, entering
from stage left. This is what we’ve made language for,
to enter the world’s drama as player, not just reflex
towards food or away from the saber-tooth.
So now to the enemy, Word Loss.
Robert Bly in his great anthology News of the Universe recounts and comments on the dreams of Descartes as told by Karl Stern in Flight from Women:
In his third dream some terrifying things happened. A book disappeared from his hand. A book appeared at the end of the table, vanished, and appeared at the other end. And the dictionary, when he checked it, had fewer words in it than it had a few minutes before. I suspect that we are losing some of the words that inhabit the left side; our vocabulary is getting smaller. The disappearing words are probably words such as “mole,” “ocean,” “praise,” “whale,” “steeping,” “bat-ear,” “wooden tub,” “moist cave,” “seawind.”
I thought of this passage when I read this account of the new Oxford Junior Dictionary in a remarkable essay by Robert Macfarlane introducing his new book, Landmarks:
The same summer I was on Lewis [an island in the Hebrides], a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary was published. A sharp-eyed reader noticed that there had been a culling of words concerning nature. Under pressure, Oxford University Press revealed a list of the entries it no longer felt to be relevant to a modern-day childhood. The deletions included acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pasture, and willow. The words taking their places in the new edition included attachment, block-graph, blog, broadband, bullet-point, celebrity, chatroom, committee, cut-and-paste, MP3 player, and voice-mail. As I had been entranced by the language preserved in the prose‑poem of the “Peat Glossary”, so I was dismayed by the language that had fallen (been pushed) from the dictionary. For blackberry, read Blackberry.
Macfarlane is a British naturalist whose book The Wild Places is a description of his hours and days spent in what is left of the wild. Sometimes the wild is closer than you think. Sometimes remote. It is a remarkable book that I can’t recommend too strongly. His book Landmarks is even more remarkable. It is about the loss of the language of the land that our ancestors who worked closely in it and with it had to describe it.
He concludes with this:
Words are grained into our landscapes, and landscapes grained into our words. Yet it is clear that we increasingly make do with an impoverished language for landscape. A place literacy is leaving us. A language in common, a language of the commons, is declining. Nuance is evaporating from everyday usage, burned off by capital and apathy. The substitutions made in the Oxford Junior Dictionary – the outdoor and the natural being displaced by the indoor and the virtual – are a small but significant symptom of the simulated screen life many of us live. The terrain beyond the city fringe is chiefly understood in terms of large generic units (“field”, “hill”, “valley”, “wood”). It has become a blandscape. We are blasé, in the sense that Georg Simmel used that word in 1903, meaning “indifferent to the distinction between things”.
I’m not sure there has ever been a more compelling reason for poetry, a renewal of the language of the world so that the world itself will be renewed to us in a sensual, intimate way and our tenderness towards it revived. Poetry is the place in which language is particularized. Bly’s News of the Universe was published by Sierra Club Books. They knew what they were doing.
I’ll conclude this with the second part of the poem I began with.
On the table beyond my book and coffee cup,
an off-white bowl holds three oranges and an Asian pear.
Eye takes them up. Mind calls for a palate of words,
and suddenly the undertones of blue on the skin
of the pear and the green shadows beneath the mandarins
reveal themselves. Praise Language
for showing eyes what they have seen.